A Taeko
Brooks University of Massachusetts
at AmherstThe
Integrity of the Chun/ChyouPanel:
The Historiography of Spring and Autumn AAS Convention, Chicago,
24 March 2001

Synopsis

The Spring and Autumn period is of interest
in its own right, and it is also of great importance for Chinese historiography
at large. I wish here to suggest some of the grounds for my conclusion that the
Chun/Chyou (CC) text is a primary source, and except for archaeology and a few
inscriptions, the only primary source, for that period. I will also defend
this claim against that made for the Dzwo Jwan (DJ), which many scholars believe
to be a fuller account, and therefore a superior account, of these
centuries, roughly the late 08th through the early 05th. [Note
1]

1.
Literary and Linguistic Aspects

Style.
Literarily, the CC is famously terse. It does not
greatly diverge from the terseness, and the court-centeredness, of contemporary
inscriptions. The DJ, on the other hand, not only in its comments on the CC but
especially in the narratives which some believe are based on archival sources,
uses extended prose of a type not otherwise encountered before the 04c, the time
when many scholars, for a variety of reasons, agree it was compiled. In its speeches,
the DJ departs radically from the sort of speech transcriptions seen in inscriptions,
all of which are formalized and presume only a court scribe at a highly stylized
court session. For the DJ speeches to be equally stenographic, we would have to
assume an army of scribes, equipped with limitless bamboo and stationed in every
chariot at a battle, at every roadside between battles, and up certain mulberry
trees during the wanderings of Chung-ar. Some of these speeches cannot have been
overheard, let alone transcribed, at the time. They appear to be on the same
level as the dramatic but invented speeches in the Shr Ji, and to serve a
similar narrative function.

Grammar.
The CC shows grammatical evolution over its three-century
time-depth, whereas the DJ is largely homogeneous. One detail of CC grammar is
the ratio between postverbal and preverbal placement of certain types of adverb,
such as the phrase dz Jin: "from Jin [or another country]." Such phrases
prefer the postverbal position in the early CC, but are commoner in preverbal
position at the end of the work. This agrees with a long-term tendency in Chinese,
in which all postverbal elements save verb objects tend to migrate to the preverbal
position. This migration process is almost complete in modern Mandarin (where
some grammarians even deny the existence of postverbal adverbs altogether). The
CC thus has the linguistic character of a document compiled over time, and reflecting
gradual changes in grammar. The DJ, by contrast, displays no such evolutionary
picture, but is largely consistent throughout, as would be the case with a text
composed at essentially a single stage in that larger evolution.

2. Name Conventions

Clan
Names. Relatives of the Lu ruler
are first referred to in the CC as Gungdz or Gungsun plus a personal name. Only
later do their descendants acquire a clan name such as Dzang or Ji. I believe
this plausibly reflects the origin of Lu clans in the Spring and Autumn period.
The DJ does not follow the CC practice, and refers to these people by their
eventual clan name throughout. The DJ seems to be unaware of the implied evolution
of Lu clan structures.

Posthumous
Epithets. Lu rulers were given a
posthumous epithet after death, but before burial. Their burial notices, and any
later references to them in the CC, use that epithet. This is a perfectly intelligible
ritual procedure. By contrast, the DJ refers to some Lu rulers by their posthumous
epithets even before those epithets would have been given according to this rule,
namely at the time of their birth (Yin-gung and Hwan-gung, DJ 1:1) or before they
had been designated as rulers (Syi-gung in DJ 4:2:8, Sywaen-gung in DJ 6:18:14).
Such passages could not have been based on contemporary documents, and must instead
represent retrospective usage, by people for whom the posthumous name was the
customary identification. In short, by later historians.

3.
Historiography

The
Ba Theory. Like the Bamboo Annals,
which supposedly represents the state of Jin, the CC is entirely unaware
of the institution of the ba or hegemon, and Lu in the CC never behaves toward
Jin as though it were anything other than a powerful contemporary state. In the
DJ, however, there are not one but three versions of a ba (or bwo, or mvng-ju)
theory, whereby some functions of the lapsed Jou sovereignty were formally delegated
to another person, either a series of Jin rulers or, in another DJ variant, a
series of rulers from different states. No evidence from the Spring and Autumn
period attests such a ba system, but that concept played a very important role
in the political theory debates which were current at about the time the DJ was
compiled. We should regard this ba theory not as contemporary history, but
as a later, retrospective historiographical construct.

Ju-hou.
Much the same is true of the term ju-hou, which in the CC is merely a scribal
shorthand, first used in the year 0665 and imitated sporadically by later scribes.
It there has the meaning "the lords [named in the preceding list]." In
contemporary inscriptions [Note 2], the term refers
to Spring and Autumn rulers generally, without implying any specific
set of rulers, or any hegemon system in which that set played a more specific
role. By contrast, ju-hou is used throughout the DJ, not only after the
first appearance of the term in the CC (in 0665). And it figures often in
precisely those passages where the DJ attempts to impose its ba theory on the
period.

Jung-gwo.
The term jung-gwo, meaning "the central states," is
never used in the CC. Instead, the CC reflects a fact noticed by Chyen Mu
in 1934 and taken up by Owen Lattimore in 1940. This is the fact that conflicts
between Chinese and non-Chinese peoples are not confined, in the CC, to the edge
of the "Chinese" area, but are often internal. The implication is that Chinese
and non-Chinese habitations interpenetrated in the Spring and Autumn period.
The DJ, on the other hand, sees things in terms of a center/periphery model, and
uses the term jung-gwo for the common culture of the center states. The term,
and the perception, both reflect the situation which we know obtained in the middle
and late 04c, when centuries of acculturation had homogenized the central states
culturally, and when those states were dealing with a new challenge from the newly
organized steppe cultures. The Dzwo Jwan is apparently projecting this polarized
04c situation back onto the more ethnically diverse and geographically mixed Spring
and Autumn centuries. It is not rendering an account of the Spring and Autumn
situation as such.

Conclusion

Many more contrasts might be cited; these
will have to suffice for the present occasion. They tend to show that the
CC is a year-by-year record, not indeed free of contemporary conventions
or biases, but in these and all other ways a genuine contemporary document. In
just the points which tend to authenticate the CC in this way, the DJ shows a
contrasting usage which implies a document composed within a relatively short
time period, in a generally consistent literary medium, at a later time, and offering
to that later time, namely the latter half of the 04c, an interpretation
of the Spring and Autumn centuries. The DJ addresses theory issues which we know
were high-profile concerns of that century, such as the nature of sovereignty.
The DJ is thus a work of its own time, and that time would appear to be the latter
half of the 04c.

The DJ interpretation,
further developed in the Shr Ji, became and remains the standard view. There will
always be a public for the standard view. But for those in search of an uninterpreted
and unconstrained view of the Spring and Autumn centuries as they appeared
to people actually living in them, I suggest that the CC must be our preferred
source.